“If you want to talk to your attorney now, you know, you’re telling me you want to do that, then we’re gonna have to stop and I can’t talk to you anymore, but if you want to continue, that’s your choice.”
“You mean I can’t keep talking to you and still have him represent me?” Barbara asked.
“Ma’am, that’s entirely up to you,” Hicks answered. “Yes, if you have an attorney and you want to stop until he’s here, that’s fine. If you want to talk to me now, that choice is yours. I can’t tell you to talk to me or not talk to me. If you want your attorney, that’s your choice.”
Barbara adjusted her glasses, then began to speak again in the same slow, deliberate manner.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t mind talking to you, but I’d still like the opportunity to talk to my attorney to let him know what’s going on so that he can ... you know what I’m trying to say ... so that he can follow through with me.”
Hicks continued trying, patiently and very politely, to be sure that Barbara understood that she had the right to have an attorney present during this questioning session and any others to follow, if she chose to do so.
“I think Brent explained all of it to you last night,” he said. “I don’t see a problem with you calling your attorney—if you want to do that before talking to me, that’s fine. The choice is yours, Ms. Roberts, I can’t tell you to talk to me. If you want your attorney, then we’ll have to stop right now—and then when you notify your attorney, and your attorney can come, then we’ll talk. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to talk to me now or not.”
Barbara adjusted her glasses again, then said, “Okay.”
“If you want to talk to me,” Hicks said again, “I need you to sign this form first. And if you want to wait until your attorney is present, then I’m gonna have to stop and leave.”
That was not what Barbara wanted.
“No, I just want to try to be able for him to represent me. You remember when you said, if I can’t afford one, then I would have to appoint one and—”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hicks said, “speaking with me has no bearing on your attorney being able to represent you or anything like that. [Signing the rights form] is not saying that you don’t want a lawyer to represent you sometime in the future. It’s just saying that you are willing to talk to me today with your lawyer not being present.”
Barbara was determined to continue with the interview.
“Right,” she answered, taking a pen from Hicks and signing the form. “Now you were the one in the kind-of-colory shirt last night,” she said to Hicks.
“This is the same color shirt I had on,” he said.
“I must have been dreaming or something,” Barbara said. “I could have sworn there was some guy that was not in a uniform that had just a colored shirt on.”
Barbara wanted to be taken to the Cherokee County Jail in Centre as soon as possible, but Hicks explained to her that in order to transfer her, she would need to sign extradition in the presence of a judge or magistrate that afternoon; then Cherokee County could have a car there to pick her up early the next morning.
“What I would like to do is sign the thing,” Barbara told him.
While she signed the extradition form, Barbara told Hicks, “I got hit in the head and lost my glasses, and I’m blind as a bat. They were some strong prescriptions, trifocals, and, you know, I can see you as a form, as a human being, but I can see color. I can tell you what you are wearing.”
“Sure,” Hicks said. Then the interview suddenly changed direction.
“Bob shot three shots,” Barbara said abruptly, holding up three fingers, “okay, and he said, ‘I bet that’ll scare the shit out of her.’ I did not see her move. I did not see no blood. I don’t know how many shells were found, but only three shots were fired.”
Barbara paused for a moment.
“I didn’t actually see the bullet hit her, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t see blood or nothing. Because when she was laying on the ground, like, um ... the drawing with him yesterday ...”
Hicks nodded and said, “Um-hm.”
Barbara became more animated, gesturing as she went on with her story.
“She kept telling him, ‘Let me go. I live about nine miles from here,’ which I knew better than that, but I wouldn’t say anything. ‘I don’t know who you are from Adam, you have plenty of time to get away.’”
“She was telling Bob this?” Hicks asked.
“I never said a word at any time or point of time or anything, because I knew she would have recognized my voice.”
“Okay,” Hicks said, “you don’t think she recognized you when she saw you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Barbara told him, “because she would not have been so cooperative as she was. She would have been ... I know she would have been very more threatened because in other situations that come up that really had nothing to do [with this situation] she was, you know, ‘I want you dead’ type, okay?”
“Were you dressed like you normally dress?” Hicks asked. When Barbara said she was not, he asked, “How were you dressed that made you look different?”
Barbara told him she had on black pants, tan tennis shoes, a blue hooded Hilfiger sweater, a baseball cap, with her hair tucked underneath, and the hood pulled up over the cap. She also said she was wearing wraparound sunglasses and a face mask. “You know, like people wear when they’re doctors or like if they’re mowing the grass or something like that, you know what I’m saying, that covers both their nose and mouth.”
Barbara was beginning to talk faster and gesture more often with her hands, demonstrating what area of her face the mask had covered.
“You mean like a filter?” Hicks asked.
“Yeah, yeah, like that. So it wasn’t ... first off, she wouldn’t have got out of the car. She would have ran my ass down.” She leaned forward toward Hicks. “You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Because, I’m sure you’ve heard, just like he heard, you know, which has been said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, go get Barbara.’”
Barbara was leaning back and forth in her chair by this time, gesturing with both hands and waving her arms as she spoke. She was becoming increasingly excited.
“But I never ... I don’t know how many gun shells, that is what’s questioning [sic] me because, after we left, when we were leaving. And then—also something he told me last night—was how they recognized him was him taking off his shirt and he waved at a car. Now who has just shot somebody gonna wave at somebody? I don’t know. I—I just think that he is saying and I’m thinking, ‘I’m just going.’ I didn’t see blood. You know when I found out that she was dead? When my little sister called me, uh, the day before my momma died.”
“Okay,” Hicks said. “Did you think in the back of your mind that Bob had just maybe shot and scared Darlene?”
“That’s what I really thought he had done,” Barbara said. “And there were three shells, that’s why I’m wondering how many shells were found, because we were hearing shots and we saw turkeys on the side of the road, and we thought that maybe somebody was turkey shooting.”
“They could have been. I don’t know,” Hicks said.
“I don’t know, either,” Barbara told him. “I’m not gonna say they were or they weren’t, I don’t know what they was doing. I’m sitting there, laying, last night. I was thinking, you know, ‘Yeah, he’s got a bad temper and he’s ... he has temper problems, this and that and whatever,’ and all this has to do with the fact that me and Vernon were having an affair, and me coming up honest with Bob about it.”
“You had told Bob about the affair?” Hicks asked.
“That’s correct,” Barbara said.
“Okay, do you think that’s why Bob went there that day?” Hicks asked.
“He went there to confront her,” Barbara told him, “to tell her, and [the other officer] should have that on notes from yesterday.”
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“Bob was gonna tell Darlene about the affair?”
“Right, ’cause I had promised Vernon from the bottom of my heart that even if he died before she did, I would never tell her anything.” Barbara began to cry and shook her head. “And I wasn’t going to tell her anything.”
“Okay, and you had told Bob about it, and Bob decided to go tell her?”
“Yes, and I think he was gonna do, like this”—Barbara motioned with her hands as if a mask was being removed from her face—“and she was gonna recognize who I was, and she would have been all upset and pissed off and run to Vernon, and shit would have been happening—things that were happening with us.”
Barbara started to cry and got more excited, moving around in her chair and gesturing frequently as she spoke.
“It’s all my fault. Vernon and me stayed in touch quite a bit. We talked back and forth two or three times a week and e-mailed each other. I never tried to call him at home—that was her house, you know what I mean, and I respected it.”
Hicks, who had been listening without comment for a while, said, “I understand.”
“And I never went over until he invited me over there. It was when he was on vacation, they were supposed to go to Florida but they weren’t able to because she had some kind of meeting or something, and his brother was in town from Louisiana. And I actually came up the day before. And I rode along the side of the road and I saw them in the golf cart coming up, so I tried to hurry up and turn around, and the next thing I know, there they were, right there, and I put my hand up over my face. Me and Vernon made eye-to-eye contact. He knew who I was, and he mentioned later that his brother asked if it was me.”
“Do you think that his brother might have recognized you, too?” Hicks asked.
“I think he might have,” Barbara said. “And the following day, we got together and I thought we were just gonna talk, and he said he wanted to show me all the new stuff he had done around the house, this and that and all that kind of stuff. And I honest to God thought that was what we were gonna do. Well, before I get to the front door, we’re already passionately kissing like this, you know, and next thing we’re upstairs—this, that, and whatever, and this kind of stuff, you know, and all of a sudden the phone rings and it’s his brother. He’s calling, he’s gonna come back. He’s in Centre, he’s coming back because he’s forgot something. I don’t remember what he forgot, he forgot something. So, and in order for ... we didn’t sleep in their bed, okay? We slept in the bed that we used to call the ‘Angel Room.’ He pulled the comforters and everything back, because he didn’t want my makeup or my scent or anything like that on, that Darlene could recognize. I will be this explicit: he came so hard, he shit in the bed.”
At this unexpectedly graphic disclosure, Hicks became red-faced and grew visibly embarrassed. After a slight pause, he said, “Okay... .”
Barbara continued to sniffle, fidget in her chair, and wave her hands in the air as she spoke.
“Now, Vernon would never touch Darlene in a million years. He would never slap her, he would never do anything. But I knew they were having a lot of hard times with her son, and a couple of times, he had given her an ultimatum, ‘Either him or me.’
“She had even asked somebody that they worked with, at lunch, if they had an apartment to rent. She came to him and asked him how much they still owed, whatever, on that car that they still have. You know, there was some serious contemplation here going on.
“And during that time, we were talking a lot, okay? Now, I didn’t come back that night, because her sister came over with her nephew and they cooked pizza, and the nephew spent the night—supposedly, they were going to be watching an Astros game or a Dallas game. I don’t remember—it was a Texas game, it was football or baseball, I don’t remember, because I don’t watch any more of them. Come to find out the reason the little boy stayed there was because he had a girlfriend that lives locally there, that his mother does not approve of. He stayed on the phone and never watched the game. And I told Vernon, ‘Now, look, don’t let him disrespect you.’ You know what I mean. ‘You need to go in there and tell him, “I know what you are doing, this is enough. I’m not gonna do this behind your parents’ back.’”
“‘Or if he comes and says, “Can I use your car?” tell him, “No, without a doubt, if you’re gonna go anywhere, it’s to your house.”’ You know, this kind of stuff.”
Barbara had begun to cry and turned away from Hicks, sobbing, with her hands over her face.
“Barbara, did Vernon know that you and Bob were coming up there that day to talk to Darlene?” Hicks asked.
“No, I didn’t even know it,” Barbara said, still crying.
“Okay, do you think Bob may have talked to Vernon and told him he was coming?”
“No, no, no, no.” She was still crying and shaking her head.
“You don’t think he would have done that?” “No, because I think if Bob, if Vernon would have been there, too, he’d probably would have done the same exact thing. ’Cause of them both together, you know.”
“You think he would have killed Vernon, too?” Hicks asked.
“I don’t know if he killed Darlene! I don’t remember. I do not remember. You would think, the way that thing read in the paper, you, this slaughter, this is how they put it, and stuff like that. Seems like you would have seen blood and stuff in the water. And you know, and in my mind ... I pulled it up when my sister told me and I said, ‘No way, because I was looking for homes in Rome.’ That’s why I was in Rome during that time, because I had went to see a banker and I was supposed to go see a lady with AACA, which helped people with disability get houses, and stuff like that, and I couldn’t see her.”
“Well, Barbara—” Hicks began.
“I even have all my money willed to Vernon and Darlene,” Barbara said, leaning forward in her chair.
“Well, if you think about it, you know,” Hicks said, “if Bob hadn’t killed her, why did he throw the gun away? Why did y’all throw her purse away? Why did y’all throw your clothes away when y’all got home?”
“I know,” Barbara began, waving her arms and moving around in her chair. “I know that part because my face was busted and we didn’t know where the set of glasses was, and all that kind of stuff, you know. And he figured they might be able to find it, and I only had a little piece of glass, my face was gashed open, here I’m bleeding in her car, and you know what I’m saying.”
“Who was driving Darlene’s car? Was it you or was it Bob?”
“It was Bob,” Barbara answered Hicks, then asked him if there were only three empty shotgun shells found at the scene. He told her he wasn’t sure, since he wasn’t the one who collected them.
“We started freaking when he realized that my, well, I knew right off the bat my face was slashed, but anyhow ...”
Barbara said that in her earlier interview, she had been told that Bob waved at one of the witnesses and took off his shirt, and she raised up her head and looked, and that’s when the witness recognized her, before she put her head back down.
“Why did Bob hit you?” Hicks asked.
“I think to get me out of the way, because, you know, I was kind of like, I—I, he hit me with the butt, the back end of the gun, kind of this way. (She demonstrated.) I don’t know if it was just like a ‘get out of the way’ type thing. We never talked about it. We never talked about it.”
“Were you saying anything when he hit you or anything?” Hicks asked.
Barbara seemed confused.
“I didn’t know what was gonna happen, okay? I didn’t know what was gonna happen.”
“Did he hit you before or after—”
“Never, but he had a major fight with his father the month before ... ,” Barbara interrupted.
“Listen, listen,” Hicks said. “Did he hit you before or after he shot the shotgun?”
“Before. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t see. I knew there was a body there, but I didn’t see red.”
“Okay, that’s why you couldn’t see her, because he had already hit you with the gun and broken your glasses?”
“Correct,” Barbara said. “I could see the figure of the person, but I couldn’t see red. The way, you know, her being ‘slaughtered,’ seems like there would have been a lot of blood and gore. There was none.”
“Well,” Hicks said, “you know, I could understand if you didn’t see, you know, a lot of things because, like you said, your glasses were broken and you could just see shapes and things like that. And if you had just been hit in the face with a shotgun butt, too, that would affect your vision some, too, you know.”
“Well,” Barbara said, “he didn’t say something. He didn’t say, like, ‘Okay, now it’s over. Now she’s dead.’ he just said, ‘Maybe that will scare the shit out of her.’”
“Okay,” Hicks said, “and after he quit shooting, y’all just moved the car up there and y’all got in your vehicle and left?”
“Right, we didn’t speed off. We didn’t do nothing. You know, there’s probably on the teleprompter [sic] of us going in, getting gas at the gas station, just calm like this, because I thought he was just gonna scare the shit out of her. I think that’s what he did, too.”
24
Hicks tried to learn more about the station where Barbara and Bob had stopped for gas after leaving the scene.
“You said earlier that y’all threw the purse in a Dumpster behind a gas station?” he asked.
“At the same gas station that we went in and got gas and I got something to drink. There should be something on their video.” Barbara gave more specifics about the location of the gas station, and said the store’s video should show her dropping a dollar while paying.
“I was kind of shaky. I really couldn’t see, whatever, and stuff. I know the clerk noticed my face and, anyhow, she came back out there and she handed me my dollar back, and she said, ‘Ma’am, I think you dropped this.’”
Having gotten sufficient information concerning the location of the gas station, Hicks then turned the conversation toward the whereabouts of the shotgun.
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